The Office Handbook: Advice from a Pragmatic Millennial, #1

By Peter Johnson

The author leverages his experiences and observations in this light-hearted and compelling dialogue with the reader. Whether you are a teenager contemplating college or a mid-career professional, there are good notes, observations, and humor in this no-filler-added handbook.

 

Divided into three easily digestible sections, learn about all the things the author wishes they knew:

 

1. How to be a professional featuring:

• The importance of summer jobs
• How to pick a degree
• What college doesn't teach you

1. Navigating early career challenges including:

• How to manage managers
• What to expect when managing projects
• How hard should you work

1. Traveling the road to success with:

• The reality about raises
• How your actions affect others
• The value in saying no

 

Dive into this author's dead-pan delivery and laugh (or cry) while connecting the dots and learning a few ways to either get yelled at or get ahead.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unprovoked Pragmatist
• Release date: Dec 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201875558

Peter Johnson

Peter Michael Johnson is a midwestern-raised engineer and servant-leader interested in improving dialogue between others and re-framing success. He is also an outdoorsman and novice woodworker. Look for his next books in the Advice from a Pragmatic Millennial series and follow Peter and the Unprovoked Pragmatist team at unprovokedpragmatist.com.

Book preview

Prologue:

Just a Nobody

I am a self-described realist. I preface with self-described because I know that you are rolling your eyes. Maybe you threw out an exasperated sigh. You are thinking, he must be a pessimist. Well, I may be biased, but I do believe it is true. I believe that someone can be neither positive nor negative. That reality doesn’t care about our feelings and our personal slants on them. Nor is it binary. Zero or one. True or false. Optimistic or pessimistic. Having an opinion or belief about something that is interpreted as not positive does not inherently make it negative. That kind of thinking is what leads to the us or them mentality and tribalism that is plaguing our society today.  

If the first paragraph didn’t cue you in, I have a lot of opinions about a myriad of topics. At the time of this writing, I am a twenty-nine-year-old white guy from northern Illinois. I have had the usual hardships, come from a good and wholesome, lower middle-class family, and received a good education. I did not write this book to complain, be divisive, or be misleading. Nor do any of these experiences or opinions apply to everyone. I simply wanted to provide some realistic tips, tricks, and general advice from my relative experiences in life. Advice that I would have liked to know before entering the workplace. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, What could this white, midwestern-raised, corn finished, offensively average man know about anything? That is a fair question.

Why should you believe what I have to say? The truth is that you probably shouldn’t. Or rather, you should approach everything I write with a healthy degree of skepticism. I pride myself on my observational abilities and I am generally accepted to be intelligent. But by no means do I possess a genius  level of intelligence and I am subject to my personal experiences, observations, and cultural biases, as are we all.

I am a nobody. And in this book, I compare myself to other nobodies (particularly by best friend and contributor Dallas). He and I are two guys who came up together, approached life very differently, and ultimately landed in the same place (within an acceptable degree of error). The same place that you too have likely, or will likely, land. Working at a job, grinding away at the day-to-day, thinking to yourself that forty years seems like a long time to be doing whatever it is you do for a living.

When I look around, I see a lot of information about what was, what will be, or what should be. I see too much emotionally driven media (whether that be feel good self-help books on retiring by thirty or inflammatory political diatribes). I believe that we are missing a conversation about what really is. Not anything specifically good or bad, but what is going on in everyday life. Not emotionally charged opinions or accusations. But the uninteresting and ordinary day-to-day experiences that the majority of us will experience.

There is a lot of partisanship and division in this world, and I wanted to take a moment to step away from the fanciful and fearful. To have an open and honest conversation about, well, everything. A focus on pragmatism rather than idealism. Contentment rather than satisfaction. I, with a little bit of help from Dallas and some other friends and family, am going to address these ideas through a short series. Bite size content that is easily digestible for you. I cannot stand when a fifty-page book fills two-hundred pages with filler and so I will not subject anyone else to that. This particular work pertains to entering, surviving, and occasionally thriving in the workplace.

###

One last preface, before I get into the real content. I have a background in the manufacturing industry, from medical to aerospace. What I have to say is heavily influenced by my experiences primarily in production and development. I know that many of you will be able to relate to what I am writing about. For others, some of the specifics may be unhelpful but I believe that there are many good tips and tricks in this book that can be applied from floor workers to nurses,